


Sunflowers

by AParisianShakespearean



Series: Dragon Age One Shots [18]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Flowers, Fluff, Grand Romantic Gestures, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 03:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15355548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParisianShakespearean/pseuds/AParisianShakespearean
Summary: Sunflowers remind Cullen of home, and a few other things.





	Sunflowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spectre-ro (ro_shepard)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ro_shepard/gifts).



In the Circle there were books of poems Cullen read in quiet moments. Poems of love, poems that depicted love as a secret shared, and poems that spoke of love as promises and finding the sun through the darkness. He read them all in his quiet moments, imagining gentle days with another. He saw the moments as he often saw the fairytales his mother used to read to him as a child—surreal in his mind, colorful and full of wonder. And as he got older, as it… _that_ happened, those poems were every bit as impossible as those fairy tales.

It was a cycle. Once he believed, before life came with all the strife it could muster, making him not believe anymore. Yet if a part of him still believed it was true after Kinloch as he lived in Kirkwall, it remained dormant. Love and the secrets and sun it evoked, it was for other people in those days. Life was black and white. Black and white, until one day, he started to see dapples of color. Bits of bright blue and red in the flowers that grew around the Circle, and then, after he came to the Inquisition, back home, the color was everywhere.

Evelyn came and she was poetry.

Evelyn. He met Evelyn amidst the wonder of seeing and feeling wonder again, and he remembered those poems from the Circle, even more when they were together and they talked. Evelyn was the sun, and the flowers that bloomed. He saw her in everything beautiful. He wasn’t a man of lyrics or poems, not really, but he felt something the moment he and Evelyn kissed. They kissed and they became poetry together.

Evelyn. When they were together they spun and they soared like music, but when they were apart the world was silent. Silence was the constant that particular week, the humdrum of reports and training grating, and thoughts of her not comparing at all to having her near. But that morning, Cullen could begin to hear the music again, for he knew her arrival from Val Royeux would be that afternoon.

He waited for her, teeming with excitement, hands itching to hold her, lips aching to kiss her, his daydreams too taking him too far away to properly work. He waited. Waited, and when he heard her, heard her call his name, the music came to life again.

He outstretched his arms and she was in them, the two swaying back and forth a little as he peppered kisses against her forehead. Her dark brown skin had tanned some in her travels, and though her hair, full of coils, was usually pulled back in her journeys, she wore it lose that day. Cullen always liked it when it was loose, though he had to admit he liked Evelyn all ways, no matter what.

“I missed you,” she said, grabbing his gloved hand. “Cassandra teased me the entire time. Said all I did was think of you.”

“Well, maybe I did the same thing.”

Giggling, she interwove their fingers. “Come on. You need a break, and I have something to show you.”

Heading outside, Cullen let Evelyn glide them along the battlements to their usual spot. They kissed, Evelyn’s hands grasping his mantle while Cullen held her hips close to him. Their kisses were often surprises—sometimes playful, other times they were softer and desperate. Always they were wonderful.

As Cullen’s hands drifted upward to her hair, she giggled, not even hiding her delight.

“You always go for the hair,” she mentioned between kisses.

He parted, only slightly. “I love your hair.”

Something in her wavered for a moment, and Cullen wasn’t sure why. And though she looked as though she had a thousand thoughts, a thousand other things to say, she merely looked at him. She was thinking something he couldn’t quite place.

Yet finally, with a small smile, she admitted she loved that he loved her hair.

He couldn’t do away with the notion that part of her was a little skeptical. “Evelyn,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulder, “every part of you is beautiful.”

She looked away from him suddenly, sadly. Cullen got the feeling she was remembering something she didn’t wish to remember. He didn’t wish that. Especially not when they were together.

He touched her face. He didn’t want her to be sad. He never wanted her to be sad, so he held her face in his hands, kissed her forehead. “You said you had something to show me,” he reminded her, remembering. “What was it? Or was it this?”

“I always want to show you this,” she said with a laugh and punctuating it with a kiss to the tip of his nose. “But there was something else.”

Digging from her back pocket, she pulled it out. Cullen wasn’t sure what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t a sunflower, beautiful though it was. Bright and vibrant and petals not damaged from her trip back home, it truly was a lovely bloom. Lovely, though ordinary.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked him, caressing the petals. “When we were in Val Royeux they were in bloom. I had never seen one before.”

He studied it after she handed it to him. He thought of Evelyn’s wonder at the new sight, how her eyes must have lit up. She loved flowers and was always searching for new blooms. Once they were in the garden, playing chess, and Cullen remembered how she stopped the game temporarily to observe a flower she had never seen before, a brillian blue bloom off in the grass. Once, Cullen would have thought it was only a weed. Evelyn made him realize how beautiful the petals could be. When he took the sunflower, he thought of much the same thing. Once they may have been ordinary, as sunflowers were all over Honnleath in the spring and summer. Yet he held the bloom Evelyn lovingly carried from Val Royeux to Skyhold and he held a nostalgia for his home.

He told her he loved sunflowers, and that they reminded him of home.

“Really?”

“My sister Rosalie used to make crowns from them,” he reminisced. “She used to fancy herself the princess.”

“And you fancied yourself the brave knight?”

He nodded, beaming with pride at all those “swordfights” he used to have with Mia. Most of the time he let her win them. That’s what he told everybody anyway.  
He put the sunflower behind Evelyn’s ear. She beamed. She beamed and they kissed and they were poetry. Then at night when he was in his bed and he still spun with the taste of her on his lips, he toyed with the sunflower, the petals still vibrant, and he was struck with an idea.

 

* * *

  
She was caught.

She was convinced that had it been anyone else but Cullen, she would have never have shown them the sunflower. She would have been afraid of being called too simple, ridiculous even. Not with Cullen.

Cullen, Cullen…

How wonderful it was to be caught. Yet how wonderful it was however, it only made leaving him more difficult when they parted in the stables before her next mission. She wasn’t sure how memories of him would satisfy her in their long time apart. She kept his kisses, and he kept her sunflower, but it wasn’t enough. Neither were letters, though they made her giddy and blushing. In his words, words that she always read before drifting to the fade, he said he kept the sunflower by his bed, and it was the first thing he saw in the morning, and the last thing he saw before drifting off to sleep. The commander of the Inquisition wrote wonderful letters to his lover. He wrote wonderful letters to her.

Cullen’s lover. Evelyn and Cullen. She loved their names together, loved being known as his lover.

Sometimes though, she did remember the ones before him.

It wasn’t persistent, and mostly it was his kisses and soft words and hands through her hair she thought of. But those other thoughts were still sometimes there. Especially when she met others in her travels, and those others were so obvious with their surprise that she would be the Inquisitor.

Perhaps that was why she wasn’t as joyous when she at last came home, back to Cullen, and back to his arms.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “You don’t seem yourself.”

“It’s nothing.”

He said nothing for a moment, only kissed her forehead and took her hands in his. “Cullen,” she muttered softly, wishing she could be happy. “I…”

“Where is my Evelyn?”

She peeked at him, suspiciously. “Your Evelyn?”

“You’re usually so happy,” he pointed out, cheeks reddening in that awfully adorable way she loved so much. “And I’ve missed you.”

“As I have missed you.”

“Letters only go so far,” he said, rubbing his neck. “And as well, there is something I want to show you.”

“Cullen, you are enough.”

He flushed harder, making her flush in turn. “Never the less,” he said, “there is something I would like to show you.”

He took her hand and he led her outside. Not to the battlements where they usually indulged in their time together, but down the other way, past Solas and his study. He took her to the Great Hall, and when she asked if they were going to eat lunch together, he denied it.

“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said, putting his hand on the door to the garden. “Unless you’re hungry now.”

“Not yet, but Cullen if we’re going outside to play chess you have to be easy on me. I know you threw the match last time, and—”

He chuckled. “That’s not what I want to show you. Not today anyway. No, it’s something else.”

“Something…?”

“Can you close your eyes for me? I’ll guide you along, I promise.”

I promise, he said. She believed him. So she closed her eyes, just like he asked, and he took her hand in his. She let him guide her and lead her along somewhere in the garden. She felt the sun in her hair and on her skin, felt Cullen squeeze her hand.

“Can I open them?”

“Not quite yet.”

“Cullen…”

She giggled as he continued to take her somewhere. She felt him take her to the grass, and before she could ask if he meant to show her the elfroot growing in the garden, he stopped her.

“Alright,” he said. “Open your eyes.”

“Cullen. You aren’t going to show me the elfroot, right?”

He chuckled. “No Evelyn, I promise. You’ll see.”

“So I can open them?”

“Yes. Open.”

She opened. She gasped.

There were no words.

No words, till he misunderstood.

“Oh,” he muttered, face falling. “You don’t…”

“No!” She came to his side. “No. Cullen. The sunflowers…they’re…they’re beautiful!”

He eased. He beamed. “There’s more.”

He led her to turn around, spun her as if they were dancing. In her eye and all around the garden, there were sunflowers. Tall ones, shorter ones, but each and every stem in full bloom, the yellow petals bright against the green grass and in the sun. No matter where she looked in the garden, the blooms peppered the grass like stars in the sky.

She glanced back at Cullen, his cheeks still red. The blooms that lit up the garden like stars—they were all because of him.

“I had some seeds ordered from Ferelden,” he explained. “The blooms in Val Royeux were lovely, I’m sure, but I wasn’t sure if they compared to the ones in Ferelden.”

“Cullen…”

“Evelyn, was it too presumptuous? I just…I was talking to Bull about it, and I wanted to do something special, because you’re special. And the sunflowers when they’re in bloom, they remind me of your hair when it’s loose, and overall, you know, they’re beautiful like you, and… Oh Maker’s breath.” He sighed. “I know I make it clear I think you’re beautiful, but I thought you deserved something beautiful, and...oh I’m not good at this.”

But she had to beg to differ.

She took his hand. “I don’t usually blush, alright? Or…you know. That sort of thing. I’m a warrior. Dances and balls, they aren’t me, but flowers are,” she made sure to note. “But Cullen. She took his other hand. “Cullen. You make me feel lovely. Important. I know you want me here.”

She was fluttering, fluttering as he spoke. “You are worth every gesture of love,” he said. “And I want to do it all for you. Maker, I care, and—”

“You do,” she said, breathless, feeling like she was going to touch the sky. “Oh Cullen, you care, and—"

But then they kissed, and in their kiss, they said everything. Even more did she flutter. Even more lovely and beautiful did she feel.

“So,” Cullen breathed, parting slightly. “You do like them, right?”

She wrapped her arms around him, brought him closer. “I love them Cullen. So much.”

She heard the music as they kissed, once more. She was never going to stop kissing that man.

“This is real,” he said. “It’s the realest thing I’ve felt in…” he closed his eyes, pressed his forehead to hers. “Oh Evelyn. You’re poetry.”

She was. He was. They were poetry together, under the sky and sun, and surrounded by their sunflowers.

It was real.


End file.
